The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to a modular transportation vehicle and a system of use thereof and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to a modular vehicle for shared public transportation.
Transportation is the way of moving an Object from one place to another through a medium using a carrier.
The objects can be information, goods, animals or people. The medium can be Land (roads, rails, tunnels), Air, Wire (copper or fiber optics), Water (Sea/ocean) or Space. The carrier can be a land vehicle, boat, aircraft, Electromagnetic radiation including Light and Acoustic waves, including ultrasonic waves.
The difference between the mediums is the capacity and the speeds of the carrier.
For example, light propagates in air at 300,000,000 m/S (300,000 Km/S) while a Car may reach 25 m/s (90 Km/h), a result with a ratio of 1:12,000,000. Capacity can be from almost zero mass (Photons), through dozens of Kilograms for human and tons for bulky goods.
For many years two major methods where used to transport peoples and matter, namely roads and ships. Roman roads were made of stone, although today roads are made from concrete or asphalt. Wheeled vehicles are used as carriers over roads. More recently trackways with guiding rails have been used introduced for wheeled vehicles.
Rails are dedicated trackways where the carrier is a Train or bus which can be powered by fuel or electricity.
A collection of roads or rails, or for that matter a wire infrastructure for data propagation, covering a certain area (such as a city or a state or even worldwide) is called a network.
The present embodiments focus on moving people and goods in cities and between cities.
The Problem:
Over the years city populations have grown and city sizes have increased, making greater mobility a necessity for humans both for work and pleasure. The number of vehicles has increased, leading to congestion and dramatically slowing the speed of the carriers over the roads. The main problem causing traffic congestion is the fact that the network is filled with many carriers which are arranged in queues due to the nature of the car and roads. Unfortunately today cars cannot drive through other cars and each of them is conducted by a human. Since individuals naturally differ, different human have different response times, and the result is a dramatically degraded performance of the network which is measured by its capacity (bandwidth) and the delay added to the maximum travel time between two points due to network congestion.
A weakness of the network is the fact that it is enough that a single vehicle slows down or stops, and, regardless of the reason (Car accident/obstacle on the Road) it will delay or stop all the cars that follows. It is well known that if an event can be seen on the side of the road, such as an accident, it cause other drivers to reduce their attention to the road because of curiosity and slowing the car in order to see the obstacle. This results in a delay which propagates through to the following vehicles.
Also, not all drivers follow straight lines when driving, again causing following vehicles to slow and introducing turbulence into the vehicle flow. This can be solved by forcing vehicles to follow guide tracks defined by rails, but this requires a standard size of vehicle, and can lead to catastrophic delays when one vehicle breaks down in the guide tracks, since the following vehicles are unable to go round.
Another reason for degradation in network performance is the fact that in order to synchronize the network, traffic lights are used. In this case each driver has a different reaction time and delay may accumulate.
In order to be able to increase the capacity of the network, dedicated roads, dedicated parts of roads such as bus lanes, or rail can be used and large carriers such as train and buses may be used as shared transportation to carry many people at the same time therefore reducing the number of drivers and cars. The problem with the public transport solution is its efficiency. Eventually efficiency is measured in money which comes down to the average cost of moving a human (Kg) per Km. This cost is the sum of the Infrastructure (Construction and maintenance), Energy, and Operation. Since traffic reflects human behavior, traffic peaks arise when people are going to and returning from work, and big carriers (Trains/Buses) are used that have the capacity to accommodate the peak time transport. But when the needs for transportation reduce during the course of the day and particularly at night, when many people are asleep, the same large vehicles are all that is available and have to be used even though they may be running mostly empty. Thus efficiency is reduced dramatically and therefore in order to be economical the frequency of transportation service or quality of service (QoS) is reduced by the service providers. This causes fewer people to rely on public transport and convinces them that they must have their own private transport for normal living.
There are further disadvantages for modern transportation which are: Energy consumption, Pollution, Accidents and others. Over the last 40 years, energy costs have increased dramatically, having an effect on the entire economy. Many countries are highly dependent on imported fuel and the consumer fuel price does not obey the free market competition rules and therefore twists the whole economic structure.